[LAP] Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d’État

Source: Latin American Perspectives  |  Published: 2026-09-16

Category: 정권·선거 변동  |  Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional

More than five decades after the September 1973 coup that toppled Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government, Chile remains a critical case study for understanding how authoritarian institutional engineering can outlive the dictatorships that designed it. The country is often celebrated internationally as a model of successful democratic transition and market-oriented development, yet beneath this narrative lies a labor relations architecture that has proven remarkably resistant to reform. As global attention increasingly turns to questions of inequality, precarious work, and the erosion of collective bargaining power across both the Global North and South, the Chilean case offers a particularly instructive—and cautionary—example of how constitutional and legal frameworks imposed under authoritarian rule can continue to structure economic and political life long after formal democratization. This article's examination of Chilean trade unionism since 1973, and particularly its analysis of recent signs of "revitalization," arrives at a moment when Chile itself has been convulsed by mass social mobilization, a failed constitutional rewrite, and a political landscape polarized between demands for redistributive reform and entrenched neoliberal orthodoxy.

The article's central analytical thread runs through the 1979 Plan Laboral, the labor code imposed by the Pinochet regime's civilian economic team—the so-called Chicago Boys—as part of a broader project to dismantle the corporatist and state-mediated labor relations system that had characterized Chilean politics for much of the twentieth century. The Plan Laboral was not merely a set of technical labor regulations; it was a deliberate political intervention designed to atomize the union movement, decentralize collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restrict the right to strike, permit employer replacement of striking workers, and fragment labor's capacity for cross-sectoral solidarity and political mobilization. By examining how these institutional constraints have persisted through more than three decades of formally democratic governance—surviving the Concertación coalition governments, the Bachelet reforms of 2016, and successive center-left administrations that promised but only partially delivered labor law modernization—the article illuminates a broader pattern common to many post-authoritarian polities: the durability of institutions is often greater than the durability of the regimes that create them. This is a theoretically significant point because it complicates simple transition narratives that treat democratization as a clean break with authoritarian legacies, instead highlighting the layered, path-dependent character of institutional change.

Situating this analysis within broader Latin American and global trends in civil society and political economy, the Chilean trajectory resonates with debates about the "hollowing out" of organized labor under neoliberal globalization more generally, but with a distinctive intensity because of the explicitly counterrevolutionary origins of its legal framework. Where labor market flexibilization in many advanced economies emerged incrementally through legislative bargaining and employer lobbying, Chile's model was imposed by decree under conditions of political repression, disappearance, and exile of union leadership, giving it a uniquely coercive genealogy. This matters for how scholars of civil society and development understand union density figures—among the lowest in the OECD—and fragmented bargaining coverage not simply as market outcomes but as the sedimented residue of authoritarian violence against organized labor as a political actor. The article's attention to signs of "emerging revitalization" is particularly timely given the wave of Chilean social unrest beginning with the October 2019 estallido social, which was driven substantially by grievances over pension privatization, wage stagnation, and inequality—issues intimately connected to the weakness of collective bargaining institutions. That mobilization briefly opened space for unions and social movements to reassert political relevance, feeding into the 2021-2022 constitutional convention process, even though the proposed new constitution was ultimately rejected by referendum and a second, more conservative-drafted text also failed, leaving Chile's 1980 Pinochet-era constitution substantially intact.

The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Chile's borders and carry direct relevance for the donor, civil society, and development policy communities that IOCSS engages with. For international development actors and ODA programming focused on labor rights, democratic governance, and civic space, the Chilean case underscores that formal democratic consolidation does not automatically translate into the restoration of associational and bargaining power for subordinate social groups. Programs that support labor law reform, freedom of association, or collective bargaining capacity-building in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings—whether in Latin America, parts of post-Soviet Eurasia, or countries emerging from military rule in Africa and Asia—should attend closely to the specific legal architecture inherited from authoritarian periods rather than assuming that electoral democratization alone will dissolve these constraints. The Chilean experience also speaks to ongoing debates within international labor and human rights bodies, including the ILO, about the gap between formal ratification of freedom-of-association conventions and substantive enforcement, since Chile has for decades faced international criticism over Plan Laboral provisions that conflict with ILO Conventions 87 and 98 without translating that criticism into binding domestic reform.

Looking forward, the article's framing invites researchers and practitioners to watch several intersecting dynamics that will shape Chilean civil society and political economy in the coming years: whether the current government's incremental labor reforms—including recent adjustments to collective bargaining and the reduction of the working week—can meaningfully alter bargaining power asymmetries built into the Plan Laboral's architecture; whether new forms of labor organizing, including among precarious, informal, platform, and migrant workers, can generate the kind of cross-sectoral solidarity the 1979 reforms were explicitly designed to prevent; and whether the stalled constitutional reform process might eventually reopen space for entrenching labor rights at a higher juridical level, insulating them from ordinary legislative reversal. For scholars of ODA, civil society, and democratization more broadly, Chile's more-than-fifty-year struggle over the legal terms of collective labor action serves as a powerful reminder that authoritarian legacies are not simply ideological or cultural residues but concrete, codified institutions that require deliberate, sustained political and legal contestation to dismantle—a lesson with clear resonance for other societies grappling with the long shadow of dictatorship on their contemporary civic and economic life.

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